I was actually depressed a couple of months ago, for the first time in nearly two-and-a-half years. Spent a few weeks thinking about suicide all the time and so on. My doctor increased my dosage of Zoloft to 100 mg, up from 50 mg, because I told her I thought I might need my meds adjusted.

It worked, damnit. The depression just went away. Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad that I’m not depressed. But it doesn’t make any sense to me that the drugs are helping. The chemical imbalance theory of mental illness is crap. Antidepressants haven’t been proven to be any more effective than placebo for most patients, and I am a cynical bitch who always expects the worst, so placebo effects don’t tend to affect me, not for the better, anyway.

I was also really annoyed because spring is not a typical depression time for me. I tend to spend February through May hypomanic and/or manic and/or rapid cycling, and constant depression is more of a September through January thing for me. I found it unsettling to be depressed in the spring, and I also had this self-righteous, whiny sense that it was not fair. If I had to be crazy in the spring, I at least wanted to be hypomanic, to feel that everything in the whole universe was connected, spend too much money, drink too much, to be loud and obnoxious, flirt inappropriately with people, stay awake all night, feel driven to write and write and not be able to stop writing, to see the funny side of everything, to have ideas zoom through my brain in rapid succession, to love the world so much that it hurt. That was a more typical spring experience for me, and I felt cheated out of it by having depression ungraciously plunk itself down in April.

I want to cut my dosage back down to 50 mg as soon as I can do so without getting depressed again. I’ve only been on the higher dosage for about six weeks, so it’ll be a while yet, though. I don’t want to wind up gradually increasing my meds to the maximum dosages until they stop working altogether.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 2:12 am and is filed under Meds, Hypomania, Suicide, Depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.